Morse Code Practice: Listening Drills to Build Speed by Ear

Good Morse code practice is listening practice: hear a character at a real character speed, name it straight away, score yourself, and only make things harder once you copy 90% or better. The trainer below does exactly that for letters, numbers, mixed characters and common words. Under it you will find six drills built around its settings, a 15-minute session plan, a four-week schedule and simple rules for deciding when to raise the speed.

How to use the trainer for scored practice

Press Start session, listen, and type what you heard. A single character is checked the moment you press a key; a word is checked when you press Enter. After each answer the trainer shows the correct character and its code, then plays the next item. At the end you get your score, your best streak, a list of missed items and a button to drill just those.

Each setting does a specific job, and one of them only matters for words:

Two details shape how you should drill. First, the next item waits for your answer, so a single-character run is untimed. You have to supply the pressure yourself: answer as the tone ends, not after you have thought about it. Second, Replay (or pressing Check with an empty box) plays the item again without costing you a point. That is useful when you are learning and misleading when you are measuring, so keep replays out of scored runs.

If a character does not come to you at once, type a full stop and let it go. The trainer marks it wrong and moves on, which is exactly the habit you want. CW Academy gives its students the same instruction: do not ponder, type a period and go on.

Why listening practice beats reading charts

Morse on the air, from a practice file or from a beeping app, is sound. Reading a chart teaches you to picture dots and dashes, and every character you hear then has to be converted into that picture before you can name it. That extra step is workable at 5 wpm and a bottleneck long before 20.

The ARRL made the same point when it standardised its training transmissions. In the April 1990 issue of QEX, Jon Bloom (KE3Z) wrote that above a few words per minute, Morse is most easily read when characters are recognised rhythmically rather than by counting the dots and dashes, and he linked the counting habit to the “oft-mentioned 13-WPM barrier”. So every drill on this page is ear-first. The screen shows you the code only after you have answered.

How the brain groups those rhythms into whole characters, and how to stop counting, is covered in our guide to decoding Morse code by ear. This page is about the practice itself: what to drill, for how long, and how to tell whether it is working. If you currently lean on memory aids, our Morse code mnemonics guide explains when to let them go.

Character speed and effective speed

Two numbers describe every practice setting, and mixing them up is a common reason learners stall.

• Character speed is how quickly the elements inside a character are sent. At 18 wpm a dot lasts about 67 ms (1,200 divided by 18); at 25 wpm it lasts 48 ms. It controls how a character sounds.
• Effective speed (or overall speed) is how many words per minute you actually receive once the gaps are included. Stretching the gaps between characters lowers it without changing how each character sounds.

The trainer’s Spacing menu sets the effective speed for words. “Wide (8 wpm)” with an 18 wpm character speed means each letter sounds the way it would at 18 wpm, but the word arrives at roughly 8 wpm. That combination is Farnsworth-style spacing, and it is the standard the ARRL adopted in 1990 for its code practice below 18 wpm. The full timing rules, including the PARIS standard word, are on our Morse code timing section.

Organisations disagree on the best starting character speed. The ARRL uses 18 wpm, CW Academy’s curriculum uses 25 wpm, and the Long Island CW Club teaches at 12 wpm. What they share is more important than the number: characters are sent fast enough to be heard as patterns, and extra time goes into the gaps, not into slower dots and dashes. The trainer’s default of 18 wpm is a sound place to begin.

Six listening drills

Run the drills in order the first time through. Each one lists its settings and a pass mark. These drills assume you have already met every letter by sound, even slowly. If you are still adding characters one at a time, follow the lesson plan in our Koch method guide first and come back here once the alphabet is complete.

Drill 1: Letters at full character speed

• Settings: Letters A-Z · 20 items · 18 wpm · any spacing · no replays.
• Pass mark: 90% (at least 18 of 20) in two runs in a row.

A 20-item letters run plays 20 different letters: the trainer draws from a shuffled set and never repeats a letter within the run, so six letters sit out each time and they change from run to run. Answer each letter as the tone stops. Type your first instinct; a quick wrong guess teaches you more than a slow right one, because it shows you which sounds are not yet automatic.

Drill 2: Numbers

• Settings: Numbers 0-9 · 20 items · 18 wpm · no replays.
• Pass mark: 90% in two runs in a row.

Every digit is exactly five elements long, which is why numbers feel harder than letters at first. .---- starts with a single dot, ..... is all dots, -.... starts with a single dash and ----- is all dashes. With only ten possible answers, each digit turns up about twice in a 20-item run. Numbers matter far beyond this drill: they appear in every callsign, signal report and time you will hear on the air.

Drill 3: Letters and numbers mixed

• Settings: Letters + numbers · 20 items · 18 wpm · no replays.
• Pass mark: 90% in two runs in a row.

Mixed runs stop you from guessing the category. With 36 characters in the pool, a 20-item run plays 20 of them, so always do at least two runs. This is the drill that exposes pairs such as -... and -...., which differ by a single dot and never meet in separate letter and number drills.

Drill 4: Missed items

• Settings: press Practise the missed items at the end of any run.
• Pass mark: 90%, then return to the drill that produced the misses.

The trainer builds a short session, at least 10 items, from the characters you just missed. Use it straight away, while the confusion is fresh. If the same character keeps turning up in this list across several days, note it in your practice log (see below) and look it up in the table of commonly confused characters.

Drill 5: Common words with shrinking gaps

• Settings: Common words · 20 items · 18 wpm · start at Extra wide (5 wpm) · type the whole word and press Enter.
• Pass mark: 90% in two runs in a row, then move the Spacing one step tighter.

This is where Spacing earns its place. Start with Extra wide, then Wide (8 wpm), Medium (12 wpm) and finally Standard, which sends the words at the full 18 wpm. The pool has 80 everyday words such as - .... ., .-. .- -.. .. --- and ... .. --. -. .- .-... A word only counts as correct if every letter is right, so 90% on words is a stricter test than 90% on letters. Expect your word score to lag behind your letter score for a while.

Drill 6: Short messages

• Settings: the Morse Code Translator · Random practice phrase · Play audio · speed dial at 15 to 18 wpm.
• Pass mark: the whole phrase correct on the first listen.

The trainer stops at single words, so use the translator for sentences. Its speed dial sets one overall speed with standard spacing, so this drill has no extra gaps to lean on; start at 15 wpm if 18 is too fast. Load a random phrase, look away from the text, press Play and write down what you hear. Then compare. Short messages teach something the other drills cannot: holding the start of a sentence in mind while the rest arrives, and recovering after a missed letter without losing the next word.

Characters that get confused

Most errors in the drills come from a small set of characters that sound almost alike. The table below lists the families worth watching. Treat it as a checklist for your missed-items list, not something to memorise visually.

Ludwig Koch, whose research underpins the Koch method, noted that pairs like S and H or U and V become easier to confuse as speed rises, and that beginners often mix up mirror images such as B and V or D and U (as summarised by William Pierpont, N0HFF, in The Art and Skill of Radio-Telegraphy). The fix is exposure at speed, not slowing down: keep missed characters in rotation until they stop appearing in your list. Our decode by ear guide explains how to hear these families as distinct shapes.

How to measure accuracy

The trainer reports accuracy as correct answers divided by answered items. The number is only useful if you read it with the session length in mind.

• In a 20-item run, every miss costs 5 percentage points. 90% means no more than two misses.
• In a 10-item run, a single miss drops you to 90%. Ten items are fine for warm-ups but too coarse to decide anything.
• One good run can be luck. Requiring 90% in two 20-item runs in a row (no more than four misses in 40 items) filters out a lucky draw of easy characters.
• Streak tells you about consistency. A best streak of 20 is a perfect run. If your accuracy is high but your streak is short, your misses are scattered; if both are low, you are probably tired.

The 90% threshold is not arbitrary. Koch set his working standard at a minimum of 90% correct before adding anything new, and the CWops guidelines for LCWO practice use the same figure: practise until errors average around 10% or less. CW Academy moves students on at 80% in some exercises, so treat 90% as a firm but not universal standard.

Keep a practice log

Memory flatters. A plain log, on paper or in a spreadsheet, shows whether you are improving and which characters keep failing. Record one line per scored run:

After a week, scan the last column. A character that appears three or more times deserves its own attention in Drill 4 every day until it disappears.

When to raise speed or tighten spacing

Change one setting at a time, and only after two passing runs in a row. The ladder below is a practical order for the trainer’s settings. Letter, number and mixed drills use the character speed; the word drill uses both columns.

Each time the character speed goes up, the word spacing drops back a step. Faster characters sound different, and a little more gap for a few sessions keeps your accuracy from collapsing while your ear adjusts.

Go the other way when needed. If a run comes in under 70%, the trainer suggests Extra wide spacing, and that is sound advice for words. For single characters, drop the character speed by one step for a session or two instead, then climb back. What you should not do is park at 12 wpm for weeks: slow characters invite counting, the habit behind the plateau around 10 to 13 wpm.

A 15-minute practice session

Short sessions work better than long ones. Koch found that a half-hour lesson was about the useful limit, with longer periods showing diminishing returns, and CW Academy asks its students to keep practice to about 15 minutes a session. The plan below fits that window and uses every part of the trainer.

1. Warm up (2 minutes). One 10-item run of a set you already pass easily. Replays allowed. The aim is to tune your ear, not to score.
2. Main drill (6 minutes). Two or three 20-item runs of today’s target drill, no replays. Log each score.
3. Missed items (2 minutes). Press Practise the missed items after the main drill and run it once or twice.
4. Words (4 minutes). Two 20-item runs of Common words at your current spacing step. Log both.
5. Log and stop (1 minute). Write down your missed characters and tomorrow’s step. Stop while you are still accurate; a tired ear practises mistakes.

A 20-item run of single characters usually takes one to two minutes, so the timings are generous. If you finish early, add a short message from Drill 6 rather than another run of the same set.

A four-week practice schedule

Aim for two sessions a day on most days, for example one in the morning and one in the evening. Spacing matters as much as total time: the research Koch cited found that the same number of lessons spread over more days was far more effective than cramming them into a few. The schedule below is a template, not a deadline. Move to the next week only when you meet that week’s pass marks; staying on a week longer is normal.

If you practise once a day instead of twice, expect each row to take roughly twice as long. That is fine. What matters is not skipping days for long stretches.

Practise with real transmissions

The trainer uses perfect machine timing and one clean tone. Real Morse has noise, varied speeds and human rhythm, so add real-world listening once you pass Step 4 of the ladder.

• ARRL W1AW code practice. The ARRL’s headquarters station sends scheduled practice on several amateur bands: slow sessions at 5, 7.5, 10, 13 and 15 wpm, and fast sessions stepping down from 35 wpm to 10 wpm, using text from QST magazine. Times and frequencies are on the W1AW operating schedule.
• Common on-air groups. Sequences such as -.-. --.- and --... ...-- turn up in almost every contact and soon become sounds in their own right. Our Morse code abbreviations guide lists the ones worth learning as words.
• Callsigns. Mixed letters and numbers at speed are a demanding real-world copying test. Our callsign guide has a dedicated callsign drill.

Common practice mistakes

• Using Replay in scored runs. It makes the score meaningless. Replay in warm-ups only.
• Slowing the characters down. It feels easier and trains counting. Add space between characters instead.
• Practising only what you already know. A run of letters at 100% is pleasant and teaches little. Spend most of the session on the set that scores lowest.
• Changing two settings at once. If your score drops, you will not know which change caused it.
• Studying the code after each answer. The trainer shows the dots and dashes as feedback. Glance at the character name and keep your attention on the next sound.
• Writing dots and dashes on paper. Write or type the character itself; our homepage explains why in reading and writing Morse code.
• Marathon sessions. Accuracy falls when you are tired, and errors you repeat become habits.
• Waiting for perfection. 90% twice is the bar. Some errors at a new step are expected, and they shrink as you practise at that step.